Note: Quidditch League Semi-Finals, Holyhead Harpies, Chaser 3. Task: Write about Madam Hooch's last day on the job.
Prompts:
(quote) "Being alone is better than being with the wrong person." -L, Death Note
(picture) paper-and-string parcel
(phrase) "Fingers crossed."
On the first of July in the year 1998, the renovations to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry were finally completed. The crumbled walls had been rebuilt, the dented and damaged suits of armor had been refitted, and the scorched grounds were once again green and growing. Dark magic had torn the majestic castle asunder on that unforgettable night in May, but light had put her right again, and as though it knew the significance of the occasion, the sun was high and bright in the sky. From bailey to barbican, Hogwarts was new and shiny again.
The grounds went undisturbed that day, save for single row of evenly-spaced, circular marks that perforated the usually pristine, viridescent surface of the Quidditch pitch. At the end of the growing line of indentations hobbled a woman of slight, lean build with cropped, gray hair. The marks were made by a crutch which supported most of her weight in place of her left leg, which was wrapped tightly in what appeared to be fresh, wet seaweed and sinched up at a ninety-degree angle to her body. In her right hand she carried a bulging, overlarge canvas bag, which was throwing her balance slightly off as she tramped the length of the pitch to stand beneath the south-most goal posts.
Under the center ring, she dropped her bag to the ground, then lowered herself gently onto the grass, mindful of her bound leg. She released a groan as she settled onto the ground, and rubbed at the spot under her arm where the crutch had been mercilessly lodging itself with each step.
"Had to be the bloody left leg," she muttered to herself, rotating her left shoulder to loosen the stiffened muscles. Ever since she'd dislocated it in—when was it? The early seventies?—it had never regained its full range of motion. The added strain of the crutch was taking its toll.
"You're no spring hen anymore, Rolanda," the woman said to her self.
It was true, too. She'd be reaching three digit places by September, and while magical folk lived longer than Muggles on average, it didn't mean they didn't feel the years in their bones just the same.
Especially if those bones had been immoderately obliterated by a particularly nasty dark hex, she thought grimly, patting the organic fronds that encased her leg. Regrowing bones was a horrid business, and worse so for women of certain age. She'd never ride a broom the same way again, that was for sure.
The new bones would probably ache whenever it rained, she thought with a sigh, just like her shoulder did.
Rolanda reached out for the canvas bag she'd brought with her and dumped the contents out onto the pitch without ceremony. They all made various sounds as they fell over one another, and she smiled a little. There were few things more pleasant than the sound of a beautiful cacophony.
The first thing she reached for—and the largest of all the objects in the bag—was a large, wooden box with an antique, bronze latch. The clasp was shaped like a whale, and the tongue like a wee Pinocchio. When the box was closed, the whale appeared to swallow the puppet whole. She opened and closed the box a few times with a nostalgic smile on her face.
"Oh no...!" she said in a small, mock-terrified voice, then made an exaggerated gulping noise as the whale swallowed Pinocchio once more.
She chuckled before opening the box and letting the lid fall back on its hinges. On the inside of the lid were two words carved into the dark wood: Fingers crossed.
Rolanda traced the hand-carved words gently as she recalled the great woman who had carved them. Her grandmother had cast the bronze and assembled the box with her own hands. She'd given it to Rolanda on her twelfth birthday, the same day she'd tought her how to fly a broomstick.
"All you'll ever need to know in this life, Roly," she'd told the twelve-year-old, "is cross your fingers 'round your back when you lie, and cross your legs 'round your broom when you fly."
"Why would I ever need to lie, Nanna Hooch?" the ninety-nine year old Rolanda asked of the empty Quidditch pitch.
"Still so sweet, m' girl," her memory answered. "You'll find when you're older that lies turn the world, they do."
Then, Nanna Hooch had cackled at herself, told Rolanda that her grip was amateur, and that was the end of that conversation.
She'd been too young to understand her grandmother at the time, but as she'd lived, Rolanda had come to agree that lies had, indeed, turned her world. She reached forward for something in the grass as she considered all the lies that had made her the woman she had become, and picked one of them up.
The mouth harp had been a kind lie, the kind of lie you tell out of politeness rather than malice. Her father had always told her how talented she was at playing it, but even she knew that it had only ever produced rhythmless noise every time it passed her lips. Still, her father had listened to her murder tune after tune on the harmonica, always with a smile on his face.
Rolanda placed the harmonica in her box of lies and reached for the next one.
The deck of playing cards was another fond memory of her time with her Nanna Hooch. At twelve, Rolanda had learned to fly, and at fifteen, she had learned to lie using that very deck. Nanna Hooch had been, to the dismay of her own daughter, quite the hustler at poker, and had passed on her knowledge to Rolanda who had gone on to teach the game to the girls in her Hufflepuff dorm. She'd hardly needed the pocket money her mother sent every week with her poker earnings that year.
Rolanda set the pack of lies next to the mouth harp and turned back to her scattered memories.
The small, transparent pouch contained all the makings of an emergency sewing kit. Jumbled within were a spool of thread, a needle with a bright red safety cap, a tiny pair of scissors, a thimble, and a single button. Rolanda fingered the button through the plastic, a fond smile on her face. The lie was that she had needed the sewing kit at all, and it had been told to her first love—a Muggle for whom she couldn't merely wave a wand to replace his shirt button.
"Nearly stitched it to my bleeding finger," she recalled with amusement. Her paper-white cheeks blushed scarlet for a moment, and she put the pouch in the box before she could get too flushed.
The largest of the items from the bag, aside from the box, was a small bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with simple twine. The paper and string were new, but the letters inside were over a hundred years old. She didn't have to untie the string to know that the letters inside were love letters written to her mother; Rolanda had read them all several times and knew their contents. The man from whom the letters had come was not Rolanda's father, however, but the dates of the letters extended well into their marriage.
Rolanda held the parcel to her chest and thought about the series of lies, without which she might have never been born. She had found the letters when she was twenty-two, and she had never been able to look at her mother quite the same. She questioned the happiness of her childhood, and began to notice that her mother was not as cheerful or vibrant as she had been in the past. Indeed, she had become tired and dull over the years, without Rolanda having noticed it.
As the years had passed, her mother had only grown more haggard and unresponsive to the joys in life. The lie that Rolanda had learned from her mother over time had been a universal one. It is not, as Tennyson said, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. The truth of the matter is, being alone is better than being with the wrong person.
Still holding her mother's letters, Rolanda plucked the last lie from the sea of green grass around her. She looked at the small ring, so innocuous in its appearance—silver and set with a tiny, sparkling diamond—but it was the greatest lie Rolanda Hooch had ever told. She slid it over the tip of the fourth finger of her left hand, but it would budge past her second knuckle.
"I had such pretty hands, such slim fingers back then," she said whistfully, moving the ring so it caught the sunlight. She sighed heavily and looked down at her leg. "But now, I'm old," she reminded herself, "and easily broken."
No one had requested Madam Hooch leave her post as the flight instructor and referee, but she had known it was time to leave. She placed her mother's lies and her own into the box and fed Pinocchio to the whale one last time. With a flick of her wand, she levitated a square patch of earth beneath the center hoop that was just wider and longer than the box was. She placed it into the hole she'd made and then lowered the dirt back over it, smooth the grass back down gently.
Here, she would leave her lies—the ones she had made, and the ones that had made her—and she would go and do something grand. Probably.
Perhaps she would fly across the Atlantic Ocean in a single trip, or around the world in eighty days like Phileas Fogg. Or, perhaps she would follow Amelia Earhart's flight plan as she had always wanted to since she'd been a girl. Perhaps she would also disappear somewhere between Miami and San Juan and people would make up new lies about what had become of the old Hogwarts Quidditch coach.
Rolanda smiled as she hoisted herself back to her feet. Lies did turn the world after all. Perhaps she would become one.